Mark Domino, the son-in-law of developer Douglas Durst, has developed an app, called Spireworks, that allows anyone with a smartphone to change the color of a building's lights.
Durst installed the corresponding technology on two midtown skyscrapers—Bank of America Tower and 4 Times Square, the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat reports. App users will be able to play with the light colors on the spire and antennae of the buildings, as well as add sparkles and pulses of light.
The project is still in the testing stages, and users can join only if invited by a current user. Durst says there are a few hundred users so far and estimates that about five people manipulate the lights per night.
Domino and Durst told the New York Daily News that the project is meant to be a fun alternative to the Empire State Building, which changes its lights for the holidays. “People don’t believe you can do this,” Domino told the paper.
The company is still unsure how many users can utilize Spireworks at once without crashing the system.
Related Stories
| Aug 11, 2010
Integrated Project Delivery builds a brave, new BIM world
Three-dimensional information, such as that provided by building information modeling, allows all members of the Building Team to visualize the many components of a project and how they work together. BIM and other 3D tools convey the idea and intent of the designer to the entire Building Team and lay the groundwork for integrated project delivery.
| Aug 11, 2010
Great Solutions: Healthcare
11. Operating Room-Integrated MRI will Help Neurosurgeons Get it Right the First Time A major limitation of traditional brain cancer surgery is the lack of scanning capability in the operating room. Neurosurgeons do their best to visually identify and remove the cancerous tissue, but only an MRI scan will confirm if the operation was a complete success or not.
| Aug 11, 2010
Great Solutions: Collaboration
9. HOK Takes Videoconferencing to A New Level with its Advanced Collaboration Rooms To help foster collaboration among its 2,212 employees while cutting travel time, expenses, and carbon emissions traveling between its 24 office locations, HOK is fitting out its major offices with prototype videoconferencing rooms that are like no other in the U.
| Aug 11, 2010
2009 Judging Panel
A Matthew H. Johnson, PE Associate Principal Simpson Gumpertz & HegerWaltham, Mass. B K. Nam Shiu, SE, PEVP Walker Restoration Consultants Elgin, Ill. C David P. Callan, PE, CEM, LEED APSVPEnvironmental Systems DesignChicago D Ken Osmun, PA, DBIA, LEED AP Group President, ConstructionWight & Company Darien, Ill.
| Aug 11, 2010
Inspiring Offices: Office Design That Drives Creativity
Office design has always been linked to productivity—how many workers can be reasonably squeezed into a given space—but why isn’t it more frequently linked to creativity? “In general, I don’t think enough people link the design of space to business outcome,” says Janice Linster, partner with the Minneapolis design firm Studio Hive.
| Aug 11, 2010
BIM school, green school: California's newest high-performance school
Nestled deep in the Napa Valley, the city of American Canyon is one of a number of new communities in Northern California that have experienced tremendous growth in the last five years. Located 42 miles northeast of San Francisco, American Canyon had a population of just over 9,000 in 2000; by 2008, that figure stood at 15,276, with 28% of the population under age 18.
